


Trench Friendship, or, 'Trenship'

by cloudboi



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Canon-Typical Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Jonny and Tim are 'friends' (as in they only murder each other when they have a reason to), rip Bertie you will be missed, some light gore, the Toy Soldier is also there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:00:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23285890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudboi/pseuds/cloudboi
Summary: Obligatory Moon War fic. Tim has a Bad Time and Jonny is there for the laughs.
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & Gunpowder Tim
Comments: 10
Kudos: 133





	Trench Friendship, or, 'Trenship'

**Author's Note:**

> sup, i'm contributing to this fandom now

Corporal d'Ville was a crazy bastard.  
It had taken Tim about twenty-four hours into fighting in the tunnels beneath the moon's surface to realize that.  
Who else could be running into enemy fire with no fear, laughing like a maniac as bullets flew past... buried themselves into his flesh?   
But somehow, d'Ville always made it back alive. It was impossible to keep track of him in all the chaos, and this was nothing, _nothing_ like what they had said it would be.

There was no glory to be found in the slaughter.   
No honor.   
The queen wouldn't care if they died down here defending their country. They would just join the piles upon piles of bodies and be forgotten.

There was nothing light about this, and yet, d'Ville would grin and joke around like he was having the time of his life. The strange wooden man that had come with him, the Toy Soldier, would occasionally chime in, and d'Ville would either ignore it or, when he was at his happiest, even indulge it.

Tim never felt up for laughing, but Bertie did. Apparently laughter, for him, was a way to combat the horrors.

That and the songs that they sung under their breaths, lying pressed together under a lead sheet, the Toy Soldier's wooden shoulder digging painfully into Tim's abdomen as it curled up on top of them to save space.   
Tim didn't complain. The Toy Soldier had a lovely voice to go with theirs, rough from moon dust and yelling.

That was the reason why he felt a little sting of loss, though numbed by the many before, when he spotted d'Ville walking out of the smoked up tunnel on his own, covered in guts and blood and dirt as per usual.

"Where's TS?" Tim asked and tried not to cough at the smoke.

They'd gotten separated earlier, with almost an entire battalion of Lunar Men between them, and d'Ville had, as always, miraculously made his way back.   
If Tim didn't know any better, he would have said the guy was getting fond of them.

He did know better though.

d'Ville gave a little shrug, and wiped some unidentifiable mass of bloody tissue off his cheek. "It switched sides so I blew it to pieces."   
He sounded more annoyed than betrayed, and Tim frowned at him.  
"Really, just like that?"

"Well, what do you want me to say? It's madness out there!" d'Ville's eyes sparkled a little as he said that. "It probably got bored of our uniforms and thought the Lennys looked fancier."

That sounded on par with what Tim had so far figured out about the Toy Soldier. He sighed.

"Shame." Bertie finished his search for food in his nearly empty backpack and sat down to break a nutrition bar into three pieces. "Was nice to have a soprano while it lasted."

Tim shook his head in exasperation. "Was nice to have someone who could actually aim for shit."

"Hey!" d'Ville took off his uniform jacket and frowned down at his undershirt, covered in bloodied spots and holes where Tim was pretty sure he'd been pierced by bullets and had shaken it off like always. "My aim's great."

Tim snorted. "No offense, Corporal, your way of 'aiming' is just firing a machine gun into enemy lines and cackling like a mad bastard."

"I hit them, don't I?" d'Ville sat against the wall of the tunnel and sighed. "Also it's Captain."

"Pretty sure that's not your rank," Bertie said, tossing a third of the nutrition bar at d'Ville's head.

He caught it in the air without even looking. "Oh, you have no idea how wrong you are about that." One eye opened to fixate Tim. "... you're right about the aiming thing though. You two are shit with those lazers. They're shit guns anyway. All clean and mass produced. A real gun's gotta smell like one. Handle like one. Feel like a lover's caress in your hand."

"Because you've felt that one a lot," Bertie murmured under his breath, and in an instant was faced with the barrel of d'Ville's favorite gun - a terribly old-fashioned revolver that didn't see all that much use these days but was brought out for cleaning and maintenance every night.

Now, it was unwavering in the air as d'Ville raised his brows at Bertie.   
For one wild second, Tim thought he would actually shoot, but then he laughed and flipped the gun around, presenting Tim with the handle. "Here, try this. Don't break anything."

Tim wrapped his hand around the gun and experimentally shot at one of the wooden planks they'd set up for target practice earlier.   
The recoil was so harsh that his arm hurt all the way through to his shoulder. The bullet hit its mark, only slightly off center.   
The barrel smoked, and it smelled harsh and burned in his nose, and Tim blinked slowly. "Yeah..." he murmured, "Yeah, I think I get what you're saying."

d'Ville patted his shoulder, radiating smugness. "Good. Now give me my gun back or I'll take it from you and shoot you with it."

______

Tim eventually got himself a proper gun. Or, rather, the Toy Soldier - who, despite its initial destruction, and desertion to the enemy, had managed to end up in charge of them for a while - had heard about his newly developed preference and gifted him with one of its own before it disappeared again.

The war became a little more bearable after that, with his skill growing so much that d'Ville - Jonny, now - sometimes even gave him a rare compliment.   
He also learned more about explosives in general, and that was... thrilling in a strange way. It made him feel powerful.

That power, he learned, didn't actually matter.   
Nothing he did mattered.   
Because Bertie was lying dead on the floor and Tim was still trying desperately to shove his guts back into him as if that would make any change.   
A loose kidney slipped past his fingers and he made a grab for it.

"... you gonna eat that or no?"

Tim had forgotten Jonny was here.   
And it took him a moment to register what he'd said.

Before, when they'd lost someone and had to resort to using up all their resources, it had always been a somber affair. Respectful.

This wasn't that. 

Jonny had a slightly manic grin on his face, eyes sparkling with mirth, and it had sounded like he was asking if Tim was going to finish the rest of his takeout food.

"Fuck you," he spat, already reaching for his gun because the bastard just couldn't shut up, and right now Tim just needed him to stop.

Jonny raised both hands with a laugh. "C'mon, now, no need to be so doom and gloom, you gotta admit, it was kinda funny, his face when he was trying to hold in his intes-" The bullet hit Jonny right between the eyes and he keeled over without ceremony.

Tim scrambled over to him and took his gun off his belt.   
It was a beautiful piece. Perfectly balanced. Wasted on Jonny ten times over.

No, Tim could do much greater things with it.   
Tim could make the metal sing.

______

The next time he saw d'Ville, it was only a small part of him. Namely, his head, severed, in a box. His eyes still held that mad sparkle, and he winked at Tim, and Tim felt that familiar hysterical laugh bubble up inside of him.   
Hell, if Jonny could make it through a beheading, then Tim could spit in the Moon Kaiser's face, and at the very least take them all down with him.

He looked around, trying to scan the guards for weapons he could snatch, and halted when one of them waved at him. He couldn't quite hold in the snort at the happy smile on the Toy Soldier's face, and he knew exactly what to do.

______

When Tim opened his eyes again after he was sure he'd lose them, it was to Jonny d'Ville, head and body, staring down at him with thinly veiled disgust.   
Though, somehow, Tim didn't feel like it was addressed at him.   
His eyes felt weird. Not... bad. Better, actually. His vision sharper. He didn't think he needed to blink.   
He reached up a hand and tapped gently against his eyeball, unsurprised when it didn't give any sensation and he only felt hard metal under his fingertip.   
Alright.   
He could... work with that.

"Ah, is he finally awake?" A new voice, unfamiliar, and Jonny's expression was taken over by cold fury as he stepped away, out of Tim's field of vision.

"Why did you do this? Why him?"

"I thought you were fond of him? You said he was entertaining to watch. I saw potential, and I saved him from an untimely end. There is so much more he can do, Jonath- oh, put that down, will you? That is highly immature of you..."

Tim sighed and closed his eyes, glad that he could still do that. The sounds of struggle didn't really bother him enough to look.

"I'm sorry about him," the unfamiliar voice said next to his head a moment later. "He always has trouble adjusting when we find a new crew member."

He opened one eye and it zoomed in on the face of the person. They smiled.

"There you go. My name is Doctor Carmilla. Welcome to the Aurora, and welcome to immortality."

______

Tim actually didn't get a lot of time to get to know Doctor Carmilla.

Less than twenty-four hours after his initial awakening in the lab, she somehow found her way out an airlock, and the Aurora was moving rapidly away from the scene of the crime.

He was fine with that. She'd been rather creepy.   
And she'd put him in front of a real problem.   
He hadn't asked to be made. In fact, he'd been fully planning on dying in his last, glorious act of mass destruction.   
And now he was here.   
And life went on.

He met the rest of the crew one by one. Had breakfast and lunch and dinner with them. Got introduced to the Aurora's defense systems and promptly put in charge of her weapons.   
The Toy Soldier kept him company as he plundered the armory and made himself a nest of guns in one of the unused rooms.  
Drumbot Brian showed him how to take out his new eyes and do maintenance on them.  
Ashes taught him how to play high stakes Black Jack - if you got exactly twenty-one, you were allowed to shoot the other person point blank. That helped take the edge off for him for a while. And he got to test out all of his new guns.  
Nastya explained the Aurora to him, and he did his best to listen, though she used a lot of engineering terms that Tim wasn't familiar with.  
Ivy invited him to the library, and she showed him the octokittens. Tim named one of them Lenny.  
The only Mechanism that Tim didn't spend any time with was Jonny d'Ville, apparent first mate of the ship.

The few times they ran into each other, Tim would find himself dead on the floor, with a bullet in his head.   
It was fair enough. He had shot Jonny first, and without knowing he would come back.   
But, in his defense, Jonny had been a dick.

About a month into his joining the crew, he wandered onto the observation deck late at night to find Jonny standing by the window, arms crossed and staring out at the stars.

Tim reached for his gun, ready to be the one walking away this time. He aimed at the back of Jonny's head.

"I didn't want this for you."

Tim stilled. Frowned.

"I didn't think when I was telling her about you, that she'd..." Jonny huffed. "You were fun, for a human. Ballsy. Even more so after the whole Bertie incident. But you should have died in that throne room, with all the rest of them."

Tim bristled a bit at the mention of Bertie, but he still didn't shoot. "It's really that bad, huh? Immortality?"

Jonny turned to look at him, and his eyes gleamed as he stared down the barrel of Tim's gun. He laughed, but it was sharp and bitter, not manic and gleeful like Tim was used to. "Oh, Tim. Timothy, Tim, Tim. It's so. Much. _Worse._ "   
He lunged and Tim shot him in the face. That had to have been his goal.

Tim waited until he stirred on the ground and pressed a boot down on his chest. "I think, if you just find me something to kill, I'll be just fine."

Jonny glared, then laughed, shaking his head. "You're a real piece of work, you know that?"

Tim grinned and lifted his foot, reaching out a hand to help his first mate up. "Just following your bright and shining example."

He raised the gun he'd still been holding loosely at his side to the underside of Jonny's jaw and pulled the trigger.

______

It wasn't all that much later that they found themselves tangled up in the beginning of Snow's rebellion, facing down thousands upon thousands of identical Rose Red soldiers.

Tim felt delight course through his veins at the prospect of so much violence, and he caught the rifle Jonny threw him without even looking in his direction.

Somewhere behind them, the Drumbot began a familiar beat.

And Tim's voice joined the chorus of the Mechanisms, and the song of his gunfire answered the call of war once more.


End file.
